CFP: [Renaissance] Narrating Cities - Special Issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory

CFP â€" Special Issue of The Journal of Narrative Theory: â€œNarrating Citiesâ€

The Journal of Narrative Theory seeks submissions for a forthcomingspecial issue: â€œNarrating Citiesâ€.

Since 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the worldâ€™spopulation has lived in cities.Have narratives, and readings of them, prepared us for this?

Papers are welcome that try to say something new about how urbanenvironments past or present have produced, or have been re-produced in,narratives. In diverse locations, and at various times, cities haveprovided narratives with subjects, audiences, technologies of consumptionand distribution; in turn, narrative show cities themselves, accommodatingplurality or regulating otherness. Clearly, not all narratives, and notall cities, do this in the same way.

Cities divide and discriminate, often all the more viciously preciselybecause social and spatial divisions are hard to uphold when the pastaccretes and geography compels interdependences. Do narratives counteractor consolidate such divisions?

A city may reify the solid certainties of ideology and politics, wherematerial reality plumbs the depths and scrapes the sky. Yet with eachcorner turned the city, its inhabitants, you, take on new forms, newidentities. How have narratives registered these realities anddisruptions? Given the rise of global cities, can they continue to do so?

Cities are exciting, terrifying, overwhelming, lonely places, home andunhomely to millions: do the structures of narrative mitigateestrangement, or does narrative dislocation amplify the uncanny?

Papers should concern these or related issues as reflected in the novel orany of its antecedents, narrative theory, and/or interdisciplinarycritical theory, including cultural geography. Hence we inviteconsiderations of any genre or any period of literature, from thepamphlets of early modern London to the contemporary postcolonial,globalised novel, Anglophone or otherwise. We encourage submissions onnon-canonical texts and authors.

Contributors should follow the MLA style (5th edition), with footnoteskept at a minimum and incorporated into the text where possible.

Please send a copy of the submission by email attachment to the editorAdam Hansen (adam.hansen_at_unn.ac.uk) by April 2009.

Or, if you prefer, send two copies of the submission as well as a stampedaddressed envelope to Adam Hansen at the address below:

126, Lipman BuildingDivision of Arts and Social SciencesNorthumbria UniversityNewcastle Upon TyneNE1 8STUnited Kingdom

Hard-copy submissions will not be returned unless a second stampedenvelope (self-addressed) is also enclosed. Overseas authors wishing tosubmit disposable copies should indicate so in an accompanying letter.